In other ages he would have been canonized as a saint or called the beatific doctor; but in Boston he was a heretic and a reformer, who sought to lead men into a faith that is ethical, sincere, and humanitarian.

But he seems to have thought that going to court was like going to heaven; that to see princes and princesses was a kind of beatific vision; that the exquisite felicity enjoyed by royal persons was not confined to themselves, but was communicated by some mysterious efflux or reflection to all who were suffered to stand at their toilettes, or to bear their trains.

Though Kerouac and Ginsberg each sought to elevate the term "Beat Generation" into something "beatific," John Clellon Holmes, who gave the term currency in a 1952 article, paraphrased Kerouac saying, "It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and ultimately, of soul," a feeling of being beaten down to the bedrock of consciousness.

"beatific," of ideal personalities in life and art, yet these moments were a very costly matter: they paid a great price for them, in the sacrifice of a thousand possible sympathies, of things only to be enjoyed through sympathy, from which they detached themselves, in intellectual pride, in loyalty to a mere theory that would take nothing for granted, and assent to no approximate or hypothetical truths.